Meghan Daum

The first child whose life I tried to make a difference in was Maricela. She was twelve years old and in the sixth grade at a middle school in the San Gabriel Valley, about a half hour’s drive from my house, near downtown Los Angeles. We’d been matched by the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization, which put us in a “school-based program.” This meant that Maricela would be excused from class twice a month in order to meet with me in an empty classroom. On our first visit, I brought art supplies—glue and glitter and stencils you could use to draw different types of horses. I hadn’t been told much about Maricela, only that she had a lot of younger siblings and often got lost in the shuffle at home. She spent most of our first meeting skulking around in the doorway, calling out to friends who were playing kickball in the courtyard. I sat at a desk tracing glittery horses, telling myself she’d come to me when she was ready.

Does Hannah Horvath, heroine of the HBO series “Girls,” stand to learn any lessons from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s January 6th New York magazine story “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life”? It’s almost absurdly perfect that the article appeared just days before the start of “Girls”’s second season. You can imagine Hannah, the emotionally raw, often exhibitionist alter ego of the show’s creator, Lena Dunham, hunched over her iPhone, devouring the article bit by tiny bit before accosting her friends with a round of unanswerable, existential questions: “Is this me in twenty years? Will I have ‘failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security … that makes life complete’? Will I be able to write about this for New York magazine? If so, where do I sign up?”

Wurtzel’s fifty-five-hundred-word essay is many things: a real-estate horror story, a jeremiad against aging, a list of reasons to go to law school, a list of reasons not to go to law school, a paean to the good old days of generous book and magazine writing contracts. It’s also self-aggrandizing, disjointed, and, in its most egregious moments, leaves the impression that her editors might have been egging her on—or worse, taking advantage of what sometimes looks like a fairly precarious psychological state—in order to ensure maximum blogospheric outrage. “For a while after my first book came out,” Wurtzel writes, “I went home with a different man every night and did heroin every day—which shows my good sense, because the rest of the time I was completely out of control.”

There are lots of things about Judd Apatow’s new comedy “This Is 40” that don’t add up. Some are annoying but negligible, like the movie’s asking us to believe that December in Los Angeles is a season for shorts and backyard pool parties. Others are annoying but par for the Hollywood course, like its asking us to believe that a couple with creative, unstable careers (like owning an indie record label and a clothing boutique) and no outside financial support can nonetheless drive a Lexus and a BMW, afford personal trainers, eastern healers, and therapists, and live in the kind of house (easily three million dollars, even in a down market) in which every room is a tasteful mélange of statement-piece furniture, imported rugs, fresh cut flowers, original art, and colorful, handcrafted children’s toys.

Some implausibilities, however, deserve some dissection. Let’s take those children. They are eight and thirteen. Their parents, Pete and Debbie, are turning forty. That means they had their first child at twenty-seven. You don’t see that very often in people with three million dollar houses, unconventional careers and no trust funds.

REFLECTIONS about the writer's crushing load of debt and the expense of living in New York City… For the better part of the last year, the balance of my Visa card has hovered around seven thousand dollars. A significant chunk of that debt comes from medical expenses, particularly the bills for a series of dental procedures I needed… I also need to make an estimated quarterly tax payment of fifty-four hundred dollars this month, which is going to be tough, because I recently paid back three thousand dollars to my now ex-boyfriend, who lent me money to pay last year’s taxes, and I still owe three hundred dollars to the accountant who prepared the return. My checking account is overdrawn by a thousand seven hundred and eighty-four dollars. I have no savings, no investments, no pension fund, and no inheritance on the horizon. I have student loans from graduate school amounting to sixty thousand dollars. I pay $448.83 per month on these loans, installments that barely cover the interest that’s accruing… Once you’re in this kind of debt—and by “kind” I’m talking less about numbers than about my particular brand of debt—all those bills start not to matter anymore. If I allowed them to matter, I would become so panicked that I wouldn’t be able to work, which would only set me back further… [B]y the end of writer's undergraduate term at Vassar, she had no ability to distinguish herself from the many extremely wealthy people she encountered there… In 1993, writer was twenty-three, and had received a raise, so that she was earning twenty-one thousand dollars a year… I had no idea that this was the closest I’d be to financial solvency for at least the next decade… The year I entered graduate school was the year I stopped making decisions that were appropriate for my situation and began making a rich person’s decisions… There was a period during a particularly miserable winter, in 1994, when I tried to make it through three weeks on thirty-four dollars, walking sixteen blocks to school in subzero temperatures and stealing my roommates’ food, hoping they wouldn’t notice… Whether or not one is paying twenty thousand dollars’ tuition a year to try to make it as a writer, New York City in the nineties is a prohibitively expensive place to live for just about anyone… Writer tells about her dental bills, which ran up her Visa account, and about a friend in Debtor's Anonymous who advised her to freeze her account… Several months ago, on a day when the debt anxiety had flared up even more than usual, I found myself fantasizing about moving to Lincoln, Nebraska. I’d been to Lincoln twice on a magazine assignment, met some nice people, and found myself liking it enough to entertain the notion of moving there… Full-coverage health insurance will cost me seventy-five dollars a month. Apparently, people in Nebraska also listen to NPR, and there are even places to live in Lincoln that have oak floors. Had I known that before, I might have skipped out on this New York thing altogether and spared myself the financial and psychological ordeal. But I’m kind of glad I didn’t know, because I’ve had a very, very good time here. I’m just leaving the party before the cops break it up.

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT. about the writer's love affair with someone she met last November over her computer modem… One morning, I logged on to my America Online account to find a message under the heading "is this the real meghan daum?" It came from someone with the screen name PFSlider. The body of the message consisted of five sentences, written entirely in lower-case letters, of perfectly turned flattery: something about PFSlider's admiration of some newspaper and magazine articles I had published over the last year and a half… He sent another letter the next day. He confessed to having a crush on me. He referred to me as "princess daum." He said he wanted to have lunch with me during one of his two annual trips to New York. The letter was outrageous and endearingly pathetic, possibly the practical joke of a friend trying to rouse me out of a temporary writer's block. PFSlider and I tossed a few innocuous, smart-assed notes back and forth over the week following his first message. Let's say his name was Pete. He was twenty-nine and single. …Pete–I could never wrap my mind around his name, privately thinking of him as PFSlider, "E-mail guy," or even "baseball boy"–began phoning me two or three times a week. He asked if he could meet me, and I said that that would be O.K. Christmas was a few weeks away, and he told me that he would be coming back East to see his family. From there, he would take a short flight to New York and have lunch with me. For me, the time on-line with Pete was far superior to the phone. There were no background noises, no interruptions from "call waiting," no long-distance charges. Through types and misspellings, he flirted maniacally." Since my last serious relationship, I'd had the requisite number of false starts and five-night stands, dates that I wasn't sure were dates, and emphatically casual affairs that buckled under their own inertia. With PFSlider, on the other hand, I may not have known my suitor, but, for the first time in my life, I knew the deal: I was a desired person, the object of a blind man's gaze. The day of our date…was frigid and sunny. Pete was sitting at the bar of the restaurant when I arrived. We shook hands… Later, we went to the Museum of Natural History and watched a science film about storm chasers. We walked around looking for dinosaurs, and he talked so much that I wanted to cry. Outside… he grabbed my hand to kiss me and I didn't let him. I felt as if my brain had been stuffed with cotton… I was horrified by the realization that I had invested so heavily in a made-up character–a character in whose creation I'd had a greater hand that even Pete himself… He sent flowers. Writer visited him in Los Angeles… Describes their numb interactions… Mostly, it was the courtship ritual that had seduced us. ..Tells how he got a job in New York, but fell away from her… Even if we met on the street, we wouldn't recognize each other, our particular version of intimacy now obscured by the branches and bodies and falling debris that make up the physical world.